The Strange Effector
by library3
Summary: Imagined life on board the Tardis with the 10th Doctor


**On being in love with the Doctor.**

She loved to sit quietly and watch him as he worked at the Tardis console, tinkering with bits of equipment, other times touching buttons and turning levers or staring at the console monitor. He often seemed deep in thought, sometimes muttering to himself, sometimes thinking out loud, working his way through some immensely complex process of reasoning, lost in his own world. She loved these rare opportunities when she could just sit and look at him and study every facet of his character and face when he wasn't aware. It was in these stolen moments that she could sense the great sadness about him, a sadness that seemed ingrained into the very fibre of his bones. It was always unspoken but the longer she looked at him, the more she could sense it, an emptiness within him that was endless, inconsolable, unreachable.

Sometimes, momentarily, she forgot that he was alien. Not a man, but a life form from another world, another species entirely. She carefully studied his skin, his complexion. He looked human enough but unlike any human she had ever met, he seemed to be burning huge amounts of energy even when he was still and silent. It was like he was burning through with energy. She could see it in his eyes, those endless, endless deep dark eyes. They were so big and intense that sometimes she felt overwhelmed by their intensity, when he looked at her it felt like the Doctor could see right into the very corners of her soul and beyond. No one had ever looked inside her in such a way before. But there was a immense warmth in his eyes too, a warmth that was to be trusted, a warmth that seemed to search out and recognise the good in anyone and everyone he met.

She knew she loved him. She couldn't help herself. She had fallen hopelessly in love. He had now moved round to where she was sat, working on a piece of the console just in front of her. He was so close, they were inches apart. She could hear him gently breathing and see the rise and fall of his breath underneath his suit jacket. When he stood near to her like this she felt a physical pull in her heart, an unspoken hope that he would reach across and put his arm around her and tenderly kiss her. The stillness was alive, intense as it always was in the Doctors presence. But still he didn't make a move, still he concentrated on his beloved Tardis, working away in silence. She almost went to reach out to him this time, she almost plucked up the courage but her nerve failed her. What if he reacted badly, it would change everything between them. How could she make a move unless she was absolute sure that he felt the same way, whether he was even capable of feeling the same way. He was, after all, an alien.

She looked up and down his body. Close up, the material of his suit looked so ordinary yet slightly unreal at the same time, it was a type of fabric she had never seen before, she had felt it when they had held hands or when he had helped her in their adventures together. It felt nice, soft, yet strange and it never seemed to wear or get dirty. His hair, wild, dishevelled as usual. How she longed to run her fingers through his wonderful hair. She often wondered what he looked like when he was asleep. Do Time Lords sleep the way humans sleep, do they dream as we dream? And what would a nightmare be like for the Doctor, who or what would come out of the darkness for him?

At these times, when she could quietly study him, she often wondered how he managed to block out what had happened to his world, all those people dying, a whole planet burning. He never talked about it, ever. And if she ever went near the subject, she could feel a powerful rage rising in him, a rage that seemed ultimately to be turned inwards on himself. Whatever happened when his world was destroyed, it was obvious that it had broken both his hearts and left him in despair. But he always maintained a un-breachable surface defence and just behind that, a palpable electric current of barely concealed rage stopping anyone or anything from taking him into that dark space inside him. In that space, there could be no self-forgiveness. On the outside, he could live seemingly forever. On the inside, he was already dying.

She thought about the times he had held her in his arms, usually after they had witnessed something terrible or been through some kind of extraordinary experience. In those moments she swam in his arms, she just held on and on, hoping it would never end. It felt like the safest place in the universe to be in his arms, the arms of the Doctor. No-where could be safer, no-one could protect her better than him. In those moments, she could feel his two hearts beating beneath his suit jackets, soft thud thuds, the sound of two hearts beating within one body. Amazing. And as always, he would let go so gently, but let her go he would. There was always love in his eyes when he looked at her, but she could never tell what type of love he felt, not a flicker, not a sign of whether it was anything more than a deeply-held affection. Maybe Time Lords don't have those thoughts, maybe they don't feel that way about each other, she just couldn't tell.

And then, just as she was remembering how it felt to be in his arms, he looked up at her and smiled, a big beaming smile. "Fixed it", he said. "All done". "That's the extrapolator shielding working again, it was just a case of reversing the macro-transmission of the Z-field wavelength and feeding it back through the self-replicating binary modulator – simple!" She heard the words, she heard them all but they were all meaningless to her. He looked so excited, so pleased with himself and she smiled back at him. It was so easy to smile when he smiled at you, his joy was infectious, his moods instant and engaging. But as usual, she didn't understand a word of what he had said and had no idea of what he had just done. She had made efforts to understand some of the principles of how the Tardis worked in the beginning, he had shown her some of the more basic controls and sequences on the console. But as always, within a couple of sentences he had long lost her, even with the basic macro and micro earth physics she had a grasp of, this level of Time Lord science was just incomprehensible.

She wished she understood more as it had occurred to her more than once that if anything happened to the Doctor and she was left alone, she would be stranded with the Tardis. She didn't have the first idea of how to even start the Tardis time-travel sequence, how to power up the core, let alone select a spatial-temporal destination. She would be lost forever wherever the Tardis was stood and if it was stood somewhere awful, that's where she would be stuck for the rest of her life. It was a frightening thought, something she put to the back of her mind whenever it surfaced. Travelling with the Doctor was so dangerous. There were so many things that could go wrong, so much depended on him being around and without him, it would all turn instantly horrible, no way back to earth or the twenty-first century, no possibility of ever seeing family and home again. But that was the price for travelling with the most remarkable alien being in the universe. The greater the prize, the greater the price must be paid. And it was a prize worth the risk for her for she knew that after meeting this remarkable Time Lord, no earthly man could ever compete. She was totally in love, as possible as it is to be in love without the other person knowing.

The other strange aspect of travelling with the Doctor was the loss of a sense of being from one particular time. Before she had travelled throughout time and space, earth and the twenty-first century were the roots of her very existence, her permanent foundation, the start and beginning of all she knew and experienced. But now, having gone forward and backward in time and up, down, through and around dimensions in space, time itself had become un-fixed for her. Earth, her home, her life, in the early years of the twenty-first century, no longer seemed like the core of her existance. The only reason to go back to the early twenty-first century now was to see members of her family and friends still living in that particular time-span. Now, no time seemed like the real time, all time was fluid. She had come to realise that once a person detaches from their own time and realises that it is possible to go backwards and forwards anywhere along a temporal linear path, they can never go back to feeling the permanence of their own time again. The thought of it had profoundly changed her in a way she knew she would never be able to explain to anyone who hadn't experienced time travel. And it forever separated her from those who hadn't because now she realised the impermanence of time all more acutely than anyone living a normal life on earth ever could. Time travel was indeed magical, but it bought with it a psychological impact and a need for re-adjustment that she had never anticipated in the beginning. She could never go back to being the person she was before she met the doctor, she could never go back to living an ordinary life in the early twenty-first century on the planet earth because she could never now forget that all things are possible.

The other strange effect of Tardis life was the loss of a sense of day and night, a loss of a natural circadian cycle within her body. Every destination had its own time so her body had become disorientated to its natural cycle of day and night. The Doctor never seemed to get tired although he did go to his room for long periods. She had no idea whether he slept when he was alone, he laughed when she asked him about it. When she first started travelling with the Doctor she suffered from a constant sort of jet-lag, her body struggling to adjust to different times of the day, instantly realised by a flick of a switch on the Tardis console. But her body had to catch up. One minute they could be watching the sunrise over the ice mountains of Khulahn, the next minute watching the sunset over the carbon glaciers of Arian. So every day, regardless of whether they had landed in bright sunshine or under dark starry skies, her body eventually got tired enough for her to realise she needed to sleep.

But then one day, everything started to change.


End file.
